Ionin and Matushansky (2006, 2018) show that complex cardinals have complex structures. They further argue that in multiplicative complex cardinals (e.g., “three hundred”), a multiplier (“three”) and a multiplicand (“hundred”) have the same syntactic and semantic properties, appearing in a cascading structure. This paper observes examples that are problematic for their analysis. I then argue that multipliers and multiplicands are different syntactically and semantically, and propose an analysis that still preserves Ionin and Matushansky’s (2018) claim that multiplicative complex cardinals can have two structures cross-linguistically.
